alonera/aevum

Aevum is a simple desktop app for downloading videos and audio from almost any website, including YouTube, Vimeo, Twitter/X, Dailymotion, and Twitch, plus around 1,800 other sites supported by the underlying tool it wraps, called yt-dlp. It ships as a single file with nothing else to install: an .exe on Windows or an AppImage on Linux, with everything it needs already bundled inside, including the FFmpeg tool used for converting and merging video files. The app opens its interface in your web browser at a local address, sits in the system tray on Windows, and on Linux simply runs while its browser tab stays open. The app lets you paste a link, preview the title, duration, and thumbnail before downloading, and choose between video or audio only, picking resolution up to 4K, file format, or an audio format like MP3 or FLAC at your chosen bitrate. It can download just a clipped section of a video instead of the whole thing, save the video's thumbnail image, embed the uploader's own subtitles, and download entire playlists into an automatically created folder, with a safety cap on endless YouTube Mixes. For content that requires being logged in, it can use cookies from your browser to access your own account. The interface is available in eight languages and remembers your choice. The developer states plainly that the app has no ads, no tracking, and no telemetry, and that it only communicates with the video sites you give it a link for. The source code is fully available in the repository, and each release includes SHA-256 checksums so you can verify the downloaded file matches what was published. Because the app is not code-signed, Windows will show an unfamiliar-publisher warning the first time you run it, which the README explains is expected for small independent projects and not a sign the app is unsafe. The README states openly that Aevum was built with the help of an AI assistant rather than written by hand line by line, and describes the app as a friendly wrapper around yt-dlp and FFmpeg, which do the actual downloading and file conversion work. Aevum's own code is released under the MIT license, though the bundled FFmpeg build carries its own GPL license, and the README asks users to only download content they actually have the right to save.